Phantomwraiths
She opens the long forgotten door with a rustworn key and steps into the silent library, rucking copious skirts behind.
The aged portal’s hewn edges rake shadows in after her when it grinds slowly shut.
Shivering ‘neath the wrap of her velvet trussed bodice, she sidles through the fusty gloam of evening’s brooding light.
It leaks from the dirt mantled panes of deepset gothic windows and swathes the torpid room with ashen veils.
Towering rows of leatherclad books loom upward past the skeletal staircase leading to a balcony cowled in vaulted blackness.
Crinoline mutters ‘round her feet as she reaches a huge desk where an antique candlelabrum stands, timelessly webbed by spiderkind.
Her gloved fingertips stroke the venerable tabletop, riling lipid dust through shanks of waning windowlight.
Finding a darkly familiar corner, she reverently pulls an arcane journal from an oaken shelved sanctuary and cradles it in her arms.
Trembling slightly, she sinks onto a musted couch and leans against its roughhair cover.
The heavy tome rests, open, upon her satinwrapped lap where her fingers lovingly slip between its worn parchment pages.
Languidly aroused, she arches toward the great book’s weight on her splaying limbs.
The ornate binding presses into her quivering lap and sultry furrows where it’s held, seductively clutched, by her subtly reaching thighs.
Her fingertips seek and find a wealth of pleasure hidden ‘neath the dampened folds of her silken undergarments and she quickens, lustily, as sensual frissons pass through her body.
The aged journal slides from her shuddering hold to collapse amongst the rumpled gathers of her lavish gown, sending tiny motes aloft to float in sinuate auras about the darkening space.
Awoken from her erotic dreamstate, she stretches languorously, then leans carefully to retrieve her fallen, treasured book.
Hugging it close to her breast, she reclines there, curled ‘round on the coarse settee and an eerie lull besets her there in the quiescent dimness.
Anon, a lowrising moon scatters pallid luster o’er the surface of twilight when she is stirred by lorn chills that brisk her mellow skin.
Ethereal wisps sough from above and maunder nigh, serpentine.
The ghostly vapors cloyingly undulate around her with a coolth of sensation and she is slowly seduced into a somebrous fey realm where mesmeric specters caress her by prowling feathertouch.
Soon, though, the dim air is leavened with the eldritch mists.
Now balefully cumbrous, insistent tendrils plunder and thring her every curve and shred her draping garb into a crush of tatters.
She strains to rise but the swarming phantoms have frozen her in thrall.
Then, mounting tremors of pain arc through her body.
Icy splinters sinuously invade and torment with morbid brilliance when great spectral spears of argentine skewer her flayed and mangled form.
Silvern scrawls inscribe lethal wounds upon her engorged flesh ‘til, wallowing in frigid throes of harrowing agony, she thrashes out at last.
Her shrill wail of keening doom pierces the library’s haunted darkness, to be abruptly smothered under a bleak wraithborne caul of death.